The Steven Bradbury Effect: Why Success is Never an Accident

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Hello and welcome back to the podcast we Are Selling.
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My name's Lee Woodward, the author of the Complete Salesperson Course.
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Today's podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, nexar.
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Nexar is a dedicated real estate platform specializing in lead generation and database management of the entire real estate company For BDMs and agents.
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Working as one platform to generate opportunity.
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Nexar seamlessly integrates into your business systems, allowing you to have an extended solution.
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Let's get started with this week's episode and welcome back to the podcast we Are Selling.
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Australia's first Winter Olympic gold medalist was Stephen Bradbury, and he celebrated a remarkable achievement on the ice as a leader of lessons behind it, and this year we're very proud to have him as a keynote speaker at the Complete Leader Conference.
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But even better, he's joining us today on our podcast.
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Mr Stephen Bradbury, welcome aboard.
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Hello Lee.
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Thank you for having me on today, mate.
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Looking forward to meeting you and your team in person in Sydney in October.
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Yes, it is in Sydney, at the Brighton-le-Sands, and we're looking forward to having you there, stephen.
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Today's topic is the power of preparation, why success is never an accident.
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That's what we'd like to discuss with you and just for our listeners, especially our younger listeners that may not know your story, just take us into that gold medalist win and what happened.
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The preparation thing is a good word and for me, if I do it in one sentence, it's I train five hours a day, six days a week, for 14 years to become an overnight success.
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Wow.
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And the moment that even younger people most of them have watched the race on YouTube, even if they didn't watch it live.
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Where I was, most people would know what fell over in front of me in the final, and I'm the luckiest individual Olympic gold medalist in sporting history, which I'm fully comfortable with.
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But I also understand that you don't succeed in anything, let alone rock up at the final at the Olympic Games, if you started doing it a couple of weeks earlier at the Olympic Games, if you started doing it a couple of weeks earlier.
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So, whilst I was very fortunate when I got gold, I was the person who was able to capitalize when things went wrong for the competition, and you're able to put that context into just about anything in life.
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You know, Steve, over the years, many things must have gone through your mind.
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You've become a famous saying as a Stephen Bradbury moment.
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As someone, has an experience I'm doing a Bradbury mate.
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I love it Doing a Bradbury.
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Let's go back in time though that actual moment that had happened and the days after that.
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How did you feel?
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What was going through your mind?
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Yeah, At first I was very sheepish about the whole thing and I wasn't sure how the rest of the speed skating world, to start with, was going to react to the way that I'd won gold.
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You know, because I've been around the sport a long time and I was actually favorite to win that event eight years earlier and I got knocked over in the first round of the competition in the heats, which you know doesn't even make it onto the television, so nobody even saw it.
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I would rather have won then when I was ranked number one in the world, but it didn't work out for me.
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And to win under those circumstances where it was obvious that I wasn't the strongest skater in the world anymore, I didn't know how my peers in the sport, my teammates and, you know, the whole world was going to react, because you know I rocked up at the media conference afterwards and there was 75 countries waiting to interview me.
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Wow, have a guess how many media conferences a speed skater from Brisbane has been to at that point?
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None, yeah, correct.
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And I didn't know how I was supposed to answer a lot of their questions, and I did it with a lot of humility, because I think in general Aussies are fairly humble people and I fit into that category.
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And, to be honest, lee, there's still a little bit inside of me that thinks I didn't deserve to win the gold medal.
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But, as I said before, I'm fully comfortable with the fact that I worked my ass off for so long to put myself into that position and I think that's a really good lesson for younger generations.
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These days that I kind of feel like a lot of time I see people in certain things where they do something for a couple of years and then they think, oh no, this is not for me, I'm going to move on to this or I'm going to take an extra five grand because another company has offered me another job and they're not persisting in something for an extended period of time to become an expert at it.
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And I think life demands not a jack of all trades in the 21st century.
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It demands somebody to be an absolute specialist in one particular thing.
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And that was what I did for speed skating, and I think that's a lesson that for our kids they can say well, let's see what you're most passionate about and let's just do that all the time and see what happens when we get really good at it.
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Because the other thing that happens when you get really good at something is you get adrenaline back in your guts every day when you do it.
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Stephen, that is really profound.
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I didn't know the first part that you were.
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You know to be the one who won eight years ago but fell over, or had that fall over in the first round.
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That would have been a harder moment than the final part, where you did win the gold medal because it was all in reverse but the work to be the fastest in the world at that time.
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Yet you didn't get through to that final.
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That would have been even more difficult.
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It was.
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Yeah, I had some soul searching to do after being knocked over in 1,000 metres back in the Lillehammer Olympics in Norway, but I was able to put that to bed pretty quick because there was a highlight at that Olympics too, where myself and my three teammates we skated in the relay at that Olympics and we got bronze, which was Australia's first ever Winter Olympic medal.
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So I got that bronze medal eight years before I got the gold.
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Unfortunately, though, lee, nobody remembers bronze.
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And so sad.
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Because, you know, when we look at your story and it's an amazing story and having you on our show today, I'll just give that some context there's a lot of people listening to this right now thinking I've been putting my effort into real estate, I'm not doing that.
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Well, maybe I should do something else.
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And you just hit upon that point.
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People keep hopping and jumping and hopping and jumping, and it's their 10th career in two years, versus.
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I've had many people ask me the question you know, how do these people really become successful?
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How have you hung around so long?
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Well, that's probably the point.
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You've got to hang around longer than anybody else to have that moment that you do understand the craft of what you're doing.
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And that could be any craft.
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It could be podcasting, speaking, selling, speed skating but you do have to dedicate your time to get to the other end of that.
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It doesn't just happen straight away.
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Within two months you're getting great results and if not, you're onto something else.
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What advice would you give to people that are constantly flipping and changing and flipping and changing and they don't have that ability to lock down and I love the word lockdown that you lock down and you understand?
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Success is about consistency.
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Yeah, when I'm doing my keynotes, lee, I like to talk about the one percenters.
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The one percenters to me are the good ideas that you might hear on a podcast or you might hear at a conference, and you know it's a good idea and you know that you should implement it, but you don't write it down and then two weeks later you've forgotten it, because we're humans.
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Most humans forget 80% of everything they hear within two weeks.
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So the first bit of advice there is you've got to have a to-do list.
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To-do list is not optional, because then when these little one percenters come along, you put it down on your to-do list and then you refer back to it.
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And when you do it and you execute that one percenter, you get a little bit of adrenaline in your guts when you cross that thing off the damn list and that makes you write more things on the list.
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And if you keep going with those one percenters for an extended period of time, eventually you become an expert at what you do, because the competition's pretty good in real estate, right, the bloke down the road that's trying to sell the houses as well, he's not a bug or she's not a bug, they're pretty good and the difference you've got are those little 1%ers that you can offer the customer that the other guy might not have.
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Stephen, when you look at the 1%ers in your own profession and as you mentioned in the first part of this interview, six days a week training how many hours a day would you train?
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Five, five hours a day, six days a week there's got to be many days more days than good days where you're thinking I don't want to do it today, I just don't want to get back out there.
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What kept you going Stubborn?
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With yourself yeah, stubborn, and I'm a bloke, so I'm not that good at multitasking.
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Speed skating was my thing and in the end it came down to not having achieved what I knew I could in something that I'd put a lot of energy into and a lot of years into already.
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You know, I think if you've only been doing something for a couple of weeks, it's pretty easy to say, oh stuff, this, I'm going to move on to something else because you haven't invested that much.
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But you know, if you've had a career in real estate for four or five years and you're still not hitting your numbers, you're not getting the listings, you're not getting, well, those numbers and those sales, they're not that far away because you've already done a lot of hard work.
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And to go and start something else from scratch seriously what, you're going to go back and do that four years of shit again where you don't get paid.
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Nah, you've got to stick it out and get really good.
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Because I think a lot of people get to that sort of that final hurdle that they're not prepared to jump and they go ah, this isn't going to work, it's never going to bloody work, when all I had to do was persist for that one final hurdle and then they started to get towards an expert at what they do and the money starts to roll from there.
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So you know, for me it came down to not being able to, you know, quit my sport, and I broke my neck 18 months before I got the gold medal and everybody told me that I had to quit then, that I was done.
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But for me that wasn't an option because I had unfinished business and I was no good at anything else.
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So I had to see it through.
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Well to come back after an injury like that.
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But as you've just connected the dots there for our listener, you've got this layered effect.
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Well, everyone's got this layered effect of everything you've done.
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Everything you put in layers up, it layers up, it lays up and it can be what you learn about something.
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A lot of people don't know this about you, stephen, but there was a few people in that race wearing the boots that you designed, like you designed your own ski boots, and they were using those boots.
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Did you just do some Googling Lee?
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No, I saw you speak earlier this year.
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We were at the same event.
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You did too.
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You did too.
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Yeah.
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So we had 20% of the field wearing the boots that me and my business partner had made, including the gold medal favorite from the USA.
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His name was Apollo Ono, and it annoys me in this country that people on the dole get paid but our Olympians don't.
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I mean, how does that even make sense?
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Handouts and Olympians are not getting one, and now we've got a home Olympics coming up in in 2032 in Brisbane.
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So I'm sure that you know the money for our medal chances are going to roll from now going forward.
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But you know, for me that was how I funded my skating career was by making boots for my competitors, and you know that was again.
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That was where my skill set lied.
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I had been around the sport a long time and I I knew a fair bit about how to make a a good quality, custom molded carbon fiber speed skating boot.
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And with a friend of mine who was also a very good speed skater, we put our heads together and we made our own.
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And then, once we started skating in our own boots, other skaters come up to us and said can I wear your boots off you?
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So we said all right, we're away the Australian way.
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Yep, you're on Now, stephen, you are I'm going to bring this into the interview here.
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You are the king of adjacent space, like for a dedicated stay-in-your-lane speed skater who got knocked over in that time that you were tipped to be the best in the world at that time and it didn't happen then to see the final Stephen Bradbury moment of the gold medal, the final Stephen Bradbury moment of the gold medal.
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But then that does come to an end.
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And adjacent space is how much knowledge have you got in something and what's around that?
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And obviously speaking is one of those things you do.
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Now Marketing's become another one.
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But just recently, take us into your latest venture as the Stephen Bradbury moment goes forward.
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I was hoping you would ask me about this one, lee.
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Yeah, the speaking thing for me.
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I kind of got thrown in the deep end with that and initially I wasn't that good at it and I was already getting paid.
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So that kind of felt like I was cheating a little bit there and I decided, well, what happens if I really put a good show together that I can get a standing ovation for when I do it anywhere in the world?
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And that was where I started putting a team together to pull that off.
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I started working with a speech writer and a comedian and someone to help me put the AV together and the slides and the music and the videos and the whole thing to tie it all together.
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So, like everything in life, it's rare that you do every piece of the puzzle, and that was the same in skating.
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I didn't do it all.
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I had my coach, my parents, my physio, my teammates and all the people behind the scenes.
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And nowadays I've actually wandered into the beer market.
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About five years ago, myself and a couple of mates that were very passionate about beer, we saw that well, the whole craft thing that was going on a few years ago in the lead up to COVID and through COVID, where beers had, you know, double hop, watermelon, sours and all this other bullshit, we were sitting around and we're like this isn't what a beer is meant to be in Australia.
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We think we could do a better job and eventually we decided that we would actually put that into practice and we started brewing what's called Last man Standing Australian Lager.
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We've been going for about five years now, and recently, about a month ago, we just took over the Newstead Brewery, which is right across the road from Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane.
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So we've now got a home and it's a bloody massive venue.
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I'm hoping that we have a bit, not more than we can chew.
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But yeah, we've got an amazing home now for our beer.
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It's called Last man Standing Sports Brew Pub.
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We're open Wednesday to Sunday.
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We're doing great steaks.
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We've got a function room upstairs that we're kicking off this weekend at Magic Round.
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That can fit 350 people, you know.
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So bands, boxing matches, weddings, whatever you like up there.
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And yeah, come on down to Last man Standing Sports Brew Pub.
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I'm in there a lot.
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I'll pull you on when you come into the bar.
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Well, mate, that is adjacent space and what a brilliant name.
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Last man Standing goes beautiful into your story and it's such an amazing gold medal moment.
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There was no luck at all within that, because you had to be there and it was such an iconic victory.
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As we look back in time, and many times when I'm speaking, stephen, I'll say to people you can't run onto the grand final with your thongs on.
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You've got to be prepped, you've got to be ready and so forth, but to spend the amount of time you did in your life dedicating that time and that's a big takeaway for this interview today Everything you do gets layered up.
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It gets layered up Suddenly.
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You've got the knowledge to be creating the boots that people actually wear and people actually buy those off you, because you're getting better at your craft, you know exactly how it works, and becoming your own mechanic, no matter what you do, becomes interesting because you've got to be there long enough to care enough to understand how that part of it works.
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And now you've got into the beer business.
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You've got the brand, you've got the thinking and I'm sure it's going to be an absolute fantastic success.
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Final question for you, stephen what will you be sharing at the Complete Leader this year.
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Well, I'll be sharing a lot of laughs.
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I do a bit of stand-up comedy these days as well.
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I might not be a stand-up comedian, but I'm pretty good at standing up.
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Boom, boom, mate.
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Yeah, but my show, the main three themes that I speak on, is positive mindset, executing the one percenters that I touched on a little bit there before and teamwork.
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So, amongst my Olympic story, seeing a video replay of the gold medal race, and a few laughs and a bit of heavy metal music that I tie into the show, which I love, yeah, I'll be working on those three themes and hopefully the audience will be prepared to write down a gold nugget or two and put them on their to-do list and go home and execute them afterwards.
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Absolutely brilliant.
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Well, stephen, we're really honoured to have you at the Complete Leader Conference 2025.
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And thank you for joining us on the podcast we Are Selling.
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Beauty mate.
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See you in October.